Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
Most Chinese parents and students often consider senior high school period as themost critical stage since one who gets a good score in the entrance examination ofuniversity may have his chance to choose a good university. The higher the score is,the more famous the university maybe. Entering a good university, one might get agood job in order to make his dream come true. By all means English is one of themost essential examination subjects that every student should not ignore. However, itis found that it is rather difficult for students in senior high school to attend to a largenumber of vocabularies when they learn English. Then vocabulary has become abottleneck problem that almost every student has to overcome, which also botherstheir teachers when they teach English in a senior high school. At the same time,teachers have gotten into a bad habit to complain for the students’ laziness on wordlearning. They believe that they have emphasized so many times to students about theimportance of vocabulary learning. Teachers also have devoted much time and energyto train students to remember new words as much as possible. But the result is notsatisfying. Learners and teachers have found that the new English curriculum criteria forSenior High School requests a larger number of English vocabulary amount and alsorequires students’ application toward those words. Then the way to acquire a greatdeal of English vocabulary economically and efficiently for senior high schoolstudents in China is a urgent and time-consuming work that we all have to meet with.Therefore, it’s high time now for both teachers and students to have a more efficientway to solve this valuable problem. In the past years, many studies both at home andabroad had been done to discuss the optimized approaches about language instructionand second language acquisition in senior high school.
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1.2 Research questions
From what we have known about the iconicity development and studies both athome and abroad, compared to the traditional theories on English vocabulary learningand teaching technique in China, iconicity theory of cognitive linguistics may be anefficient learning theory for Chinese students who take English as their foreignlanguage. This thesis aims to find out the efficient applications on vocabularyteaching and learning with the iconicity theory. Thus, the following major questionsare put forward:
1) Are teachers familiar with iconicity theory and do they apply this theory intheir vocabulary teaching activity?
2) How do teachers of senior high school apply iconicity theory into theirvocabulary teaching?
3) What is the result of vocabulary learning and teaching by applying iconicitytheory?
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Iconicity in cognitive linguistics
In 1950s, cognitive linguistics was established in America, which claims thatlanguage application is not only confined by grammatical principles, but also bypeople’s cognitive ways and experience’s structure. That means, language use isclosely related to the way people perceive the world around us. With the developmentof cognitive science, the cognition of people to language is not only confined tolanguage itself (Since structural linguistics or, we called it arbitrariness of linguisticsigns, has lost its，英语论文题目，英语论文范文
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